Filecoin Price(FIL)

This article has been republished with permission from CoinDeskThe native tokens of shared storage protocols have soared over the past week, with an analyst attributing the surge to the platforms' increased usage.Decentralized storage network Filecoin’s native utility FIL has been among the top performers, soaring from just above $5 a week ago to $8.10 on Tuesday, a more than 62% gain, according to CoinDesk data. FIL has outperformed bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH), which have risen 10% and 7%, in the past seven days, respectively.FIL’s jump comes as Filecoin readies its Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) for a March unveiling. The FVM creates a “runtime environment” for smart contracts. It is expected to enable “new applications for smart contracts,” leading to increased usage, Messari research analyst Mihai Grigore told CoinDesk in an email.Colin Evran, ecosystem lead at Protocol Labs, the company behind Filecoin, tweeted that writing smart contracts on Filecoin allows users to “create perpetual storage contracts” and their own “storage market,” “on-chain cloud solutions,” “data DAOs” and “DeFi contracts.”Other computing and storage networks, including cloud storage networks Storj (STORJ) and Siacoin (SC), have climbed 16% for the week. The CoinDesk Computing Index, which measures the market capitalization weighted performance of computing protocols, was up 16% over the past week.“Competitive pricing, relative to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), makes decentralized storage an appealing choice for Web2 entities seeking cost-effective alternatives for storing large amounts of archival data,” Grigore said.Elsewhere in marketsOn Tuesday, BTC was recently trading at about $24,273, down 2.2%, while ETH was changing hands at $1,647, off 3.5%.Crypto exchange Bitfinex's analysts said bitcoin’s recent rally to over $25,000 last week was driven by both “over-leveraged long positions” and "liquidating over-eager shorts.” Investors holding long positions believe an asset will increase in value, while those who hold short positions see an asset decreasing in value.Data from crypto data provider Coinglass shows that traders who bet on price increases liquidated $130 million of their long positions, while those who bet on price falls liquidated around $179 million of their BTC short positions in the past seven days.“Historically, this type of price action, where both the longs and shorts are wiped off simultaneously, has resulted in a range formation,” Bitfinex's analysts wrote in an emailed comment, adding: “The most probable move going forward is to scale out of positions partially and wait for the range to form without a strong directional bias.”

The global cryptocurrency market cap now stands at $1.09T, down by -2.27% over the last day, according to CoinMarketCap data.Bitcoin (BTC) has been trading between $23,346 and $25,260 over the past 24 hours. As of 09:30 AM (UTC) today, BTC is trading at $23,755, down by -3.48%.Most major cryptocurrencies by market cap are trading mixed. Market outperformers include COCOS, AKRO, and FIL, up by 35%, 31%, and 19%, respectively.Top stories of the day:Japan Will Launch Pilot for Issuing Digital Yen in AprilBinance Releases Policy Paper on Building Trust in The Crypto EcosystemTencent Teams Up With MultiversX to Expand Web3 StrategyDogecoin and Shiba Inu Soar As Elon Musk Announces New Twitter CEOBTC Eyes $25K for the First Time Since August As Crypto Markets Add $100B: Market WatchCPI shakes the marketMarket movers:ETH: $1663.94 (-1.25%)BNB: $310.3 (-3.63%)XRP: $0.3896 (-2.53%)ADA: $0.3941 (-3.26%)MATIC: $1.433 (+4.64%)DOGE: $0.08656 (-2.98%)SOL: $22.66 (-4.59%)DOT: $6.68 (+1.26%)SHIB: $0.0000132 (-3.65%)LTC: $99.52 (-1.98%)Top gainers on Binance:COCOS/BUSD (+35%)AKRO/BUSD (+31%)FIL/BUSD (+19%)

Short sellers were relentless on storage protocols Filecoin (FIL) and Storj (STORJ) over the weekend, with record shorts being placed on FIL.FIL is down 28% over the past five days, with STORJ down 20%. Both have underperformed ether (ETH), which is down roughly 10% during the same time period.Data from CoinGlass points to record liquidations on long positions for FIL and STORJ as last week came to a close.Nearly $5.7 million long FIL positions were liquidated on December 16, according to CoinGlass, while $365,000 in STORJ long positions were also liquidated. Internet Computer (ICP), a similar protocol, also had $500,000 in long positions liquidated.Open Interest data from CoinAlyze suggests the worst is yet to come, with an 11% jump in open interest during the last 24 hours to about $52 million. Continued negative funding rates indicate that this money is coming in to short.Traders might be questioning the utility of storage protocols, which have a massive — and growing — storage capacity but no obvious use case to utilize it.Filecoin says it has a capacity of 15.34 Exbibytes, or 17.6 million Terabytes, but lists storage of OpenSea NFTs as one of its primary clients, raising questions about how much of its storage network is truly utilized.On OpenSea, monthly volume dropped to $159 million from around $4.8 billion at the start of the year, a decline of about 97% and nearly reflective of Filecoin’s decline from $236, when it listed on April 1, to $3 today.